NSHA students chant ‘gantze’ Megillah for 24th year

Twenty-seven middle school students at North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck chanted the gantze Megillah, the complete text of the Book of Esther, at the school’s Cherry Lane campus in Great Neck.

Students from both Ashkenazic and Sephardic backgrounds participated.

The program was created in 2001 by dermatologist Dr. Paul Brody. It was renamed the Dr. Paul Brody Megillah Readers Program when Brody retired four years ago.

The holiday holds particular significance in Great Neck, home to one of the largest Persian Jewish communities outside Israel.

As part of the program’s tradition, Ashkenazic readers wear a century-old tallis that belonged to Brody’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Jacob Brown.

Brody said his grandfather encouraged him to read the entire Megillah after he first learned the trope from Rabbi Solomon Berl at the Cantorial Training Institute (now the Belz School of Jewish Music) at Yeshiva University.

Cantor Yitzy Spinner instructed the Ashkenazic students, while Middle School Judaic Studies Principal Rabbi Simon Basalely and Elementary School Judaic Studies Principal Rabbi Adam Acobas worked with the Sephardic students.

Over the years, the Megillah Readers Program has trained hundreds of students. Some alumni have gone on to chant the entire Megillah themselves or share readings with others at synagogues, nursing homes and private residences.

Brody himself has read the Megillah publicly for more than five decades, including 30 years at the Great Neck Synagogue. He first read the Megillah in 1973 at the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills under Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld.

In 1985, in the Soviet Union, Brody read the Megillah clandestinely at the Great Synagogue of Leningrad while assisting Jewish refuseniks. “Better REaD than dead,” he figured.